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Much better than a dedicated NAS because you can run what you like on it.

The HP-N36L is a very nicely configured box for the price. The AMD CPU lets you avoid getting into the ARM weirdness you'll sometimes encounter if you're going with Linux. And you can fit the HP P410 RAID card into it if you're the type that still believes in RAID for home use.

The HP-N36L is a very nicely configured box for the price. The AMD CPU lets you avoid getting into the ARM weirdness you'll sometimes encounter if you're going with Linux. And you can fit the HP P410 RAID card into it if you're the type that still believes in RAID for home use.

There's no way you could put together a unit with the same specs as these things - they are magic. I've been itching to play with one since johnk mentioned them back here.

I'm hoping I actually live long enough to do that

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P.S. Luck with your wife.

Just got to work out how to get her out of the house when it arrives.

"What, that? I've had that for years, just hadn't got around to using it."

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I do not need to control my anger ... people just need to stop pissing me off!

i tried ordering it earlier @ $119 as it displayed. once in the cart it was showing @$370 however. I think the 'please call' is because that unbelievable low price was a typo and they're having p/r woes over it. too bad. $119 was a total no-brain buying decision. :-))

Forget the $119 price...I'd settle for finding a price in the U.S. similar to what 4wd paid for his...AUD $221 (approx. US $230). Closest I can find is US $270 (well, US $250 if you are comfortable ordering it off of eBay) with most vendors pricing being over US $300.

Sold out within 41 minutes! They must have forgotten to update the site for a day or two.

The $270 must be the one from Newegg, (at least there's free shipping), which is not that far from what I paid all up, (AU$242=~US$254). We've currently got a small flood of these in Australia at the moment, (all $219 +/- $2), apparently as part of a large HP order a distributor had to take 1000 units at reduced price, (or something like that), so a few places are selling them, (even throwing in the HP DVD-RW for free).

They're still running Â£100 cashback on these in the UK until April 30th, making them Â£99-140, (AU$150-210).

« Last Edit: April 02, 2012, 08:01:51 PM by 4wd »

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Can anyone recommend anything better? What would be a good OS to run if you only want to use the box as NAS?

Currently, I've installed WHS on mine - this was purely to see what it was like, how easy it was to install/use/maintain, etc. Apart from one annoyance it seems to be reasonably good so I might end up sticking with it, (AU$50 is cheap enough). Also loaded the modded BIOS to get full speed from the 5th SATA port, (that was easier than many motherboard BIOS flashes).

If you only want a basic NAS function, then FreeNAS, (based on BSD), is simple, easy and reliable. I'm using v7 on my old 'NAS', v8 wouldn't work out of the box without recompiling but it's moved on a fair bit since then.

OpenMediaVault is a spinoff of FreeNAS but based on Debian if you prefer something Linux based.

Both can run from a USB flash drive, so you can plug that into the internal USB port on the Microserver which frees up the need to have a separate OS drive, (in FreeNAS' case anyway - beats me why they can't let you use the unused portion of the OS drive for storage without going through a load of rigamarole to do it).

If you're interested, I bought from these guys: DessyTek for $242 to your door.

They have both non-bundle and a bundle version, (difference is they throw in the DVD-RW), for the same price but you need to wait 2 weeks for them to get more stock of the DVD-RW, whereas the non-bundle they can ship the next day. Considering a DVD-RW can be had for $18, I'd rather the thing was shipped the next day

I've only dealt with them the once but it arrived 8 days ahead of what they stated on their website so I give them

Addendum: Should mention - if you're expecting to use Wake-On-LAN under a Linux-based OS you may have to jump through some hoops to get it to work, (something to do with the S-state NIC goes into when the system goes to sleep, if I read it correctly), but if it's going to be on all the time then it doesn't matter. Windows based OS has no such problem.

Since you're just checking things out and haven't commited live data to anything yet, now is the time to experiment! I don't know how ambitious your plans are, but if you want to look beyond a simple NAS type device take a look at Gluster.

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GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to several petabytes (actually, 72 brontobytes!) and handling thousands of clients. GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing data in a single global namespace. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design and can deliver exceptional performance for diverse workloads.

It's pretty cool in that it's a scale-out vs scale-up system. So instead of only adding drives it's also an equally easy matter to add additional servers or even a SAN to the mix. Since we're in a state of flux with competing technologies, where Microsoft may be going with Windows, who you can trust up in cloudspace, government monitoring of publicly available net services, all the automated DMCA/SOPA/PIPA nonsense going on, yadda-yadda ...

I'm now completely committed to building my own private cloud that will handle everything I'll ever want to do. So that's file storage, mail, website, media streaming, and so forth. Eventually I'd like to get a few technically inclined fellow server cronies involved so we can handle our own replication among each other. We're thinking we're no longer content with owning our own private servers. We now want our own private internet.

Talk about delusions of grandeur, right?

After a lot of thought, using GlusterFS in conjunction with a Linux or BSD box seems to be where it's heading. Done a little testing. Hardware requirements are modest - and it has good docs too. Looks like it just might be what my gang of cyber-homesteaders is looking for. YMMV.

I've been looking at FlexRAID for a while - it wouldn't run on WHS 2011 but they've recently released v2 which does, so I might have another look as the storage pooling seems especially suited to my needs.

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FlexRAID is a highly scalable and smart storage system that turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into storage pools and storage pools into storage clouds.

Additionally, FlexRAID provides data protection, monitoring, and recovery through RAID over any filesystem (RAID-Fâ„¢) in a non-destructive fashion.

It lives above the filesystem layer so you can actually remove a drive from the system, plug it into another machine and providing it can read the filesystem, (NTFS, FAT, Ext2-4, etc), you can read/write to it. So if the motherboard ever died you don't need to recreate the RAID environment with the same hardware to get your data back, just plug the drive(s) into another computer.

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Getting one of the wire unhooked required a knife for pressure... 20 minutes or so of farting around for that...

That would be the mini-SAS connector I'm guessing...they sure don't want it to come out accidentally.

Ooppss! My bad, UNetBootin will give you a USB version of the LiveCD. I don't know if FreeNAS 8 is much different but with FreeNAS 7 I just booted the LiveCD and you had the option to install to a HDD or a flash drive, which is what I did, (on my old machine that is).

« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 02:46:20 AM by 4wd »

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I do not need to control my anger ... people just need to stop pissing me off!

Well, UNetBootin or whatever, it's no matter now as the other method worked too. The thing there was the IMG file wasn't able to be read by a few different disk image programs.

Configuration took a while, but it was reasonable and things are up and running. It was mostly because I'd never looked at it before, and just needed to figure out where things were after not reading the docs then finally going back to them.

I went with ZFS RAIDZ1 primarily because I don't want to spend the rest of my life surfing for porn to fill it up with GlusterFS. Well, that and I can't afford the 500 trillion drives either... I really just want the thing to work and not have to fart around with it any more than necessary.

But, it's looking good. It looks like it will take some time though to move data onto it. It's getting about 5.5 MB/s at the moment writing from an external drive, so it's one of those that's a tad slow. But whatever. I finally have a bit of breathing space...

But, it's looking good. It looks like it will take some time though to move data onto it. It's getting about 5.5 MB/s at the moment writing from an external drive, so it's one of those that's a tad slow.

The Gb LAN is a massive improvement over what I was getting from a D-Link NAS with a supposed Gb LAN, (5MB/s if I was lucky). Considering the speed I'm getting, I don't even use the USB/eSATA for transferring things to it any more.

BTW, couldn't get FlexRAID to work for some reason so I went looking for something similar:SnapRAID - Filesystem agnostic parity based data redundancy, (Linux/Windows).Elucidate - A GUI for SnapRAID (Windows).Liquesce - Drive pooling for Windows.

All free.

« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 05:29:08 AM by 4wd »

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I do not need to control my anger ... people just need to stop pissing me off!

@4wd - I think you're right about the OS. It seems to be Windows 7. I've gone through a few trouble-shooters, and made some changes with some minor improvements, but it's still not up to par. I even replaced the cables. Still some more tuning to do... Not making me love Win 7 there...